Figma captures what you designed.
Adora captures what users do.

What Figma Is Built For

Figma is a design and prototyping tool. Its core job is to help designers create, iterate, and communicate the intended product experience.

Design and prototyping is where Figma excels. Designers can build high-fidelity screens, create interactive prototypes, and test flows with specific users before development begins.

Design system management is increasingly central to how large teams use Figma. Components, tokens, variables, and auto-layout make it possible to maintain consistency across a large product.

Collaboration between design and development is a Figma strength. Developers can inspect designs, extract specs, and access assets without the file format friction that older handoff workflows created.

Stakeholder review and feedback happens natively in Figma. Stakeholders can comment on designs, product managers can annotate flows, and design reviews can happen asynchronously.

Where Figma Reaches Its Limit

Figma captures the product experience as designed. It has no visibility into what happens in production.

First, the designed experience and the shipped experience are not the same. Prototypes simplify. Implementation introduces edge cases. Technical constraints change interactions.

Second, even if Figma prototypes are tested, they are tested with specific participants in a controlled setting. What actually happens when hundreds of thousands of users encounter the live product is substantially different from what a five-person usability test reveals.

Third, Figma prototypes show intended journeys. They do not show the journeys users actually take — the wrong turns, the unexpected paths, the moments where users try something the design never anticipated.

Fourth, Figma has no ongoing signal. A well-maintained Figma file is a snapshot of design intent at a point in time. It does not update when users find friction. It does not surface when a flow starts failing.

Automated journey mapping is the most direct complement to Figma's prototype flows. Where Figma shows the journey you designed, Adora shows the journeys users actually take — clustered automatically by AI from real session data. You can see which journeys succeed, which diverge from the designed path, and where users create their own routes.

Visual product analytics overlays behavioral metrics on screenshots of your actual production screens. Not Figma mockups — real screenshots of the live product as users currently see it. You see where users click, where they drop off, and where friction concentrates in the context of the actual UI.

Session replays let you watch real user sessions in the production product. When journey data or AI Insights flag a problem, you can jump to representative sessions and observe what users actually experienced.

AI Insights continuously analyze sessions and automatically surface friction patterns: rage clicks on non-functional UI, users cycling through error states, dead clicks, abandoned flows. Patterns are grouped and scored by impact level — Information, Minor, Issue, Major.

The Product Wayback Machine maintains a visual history of every production screen across every release. Where Figma version history shows how the design evolved, the Wayback Machine shows how the actual product evolved — and how user behavior changed at each point.

The UX Insights Gap Between Design and Production

A specific pattern plays out repeatedly in product teams that rely heavily on Figma without a production analytics layer.

A designer runs a prototype test in Figma. Five participants complete the flow without significant problems. The product ships. Three months later, the team is looking at declining activation rates but cannot explain why — because their UX insights tool is a prototype that does not reflect the current state of the product.

The prototype test was valuable. It caught problems before build. But it could not predict how users would behave at scale, under real conditions, with a product that has since had several releases.

Adora provides what the prototype test cannot: continuous UX insights from real users in the production product, updated with every session.

Figma fits well when:

• You are in the design and build phase — creating screens, building prototypes, iterating on flows
• You want to test the designed experience with users before development begins
• Your team needs a shared design system with consistent components and tokens
• You are coordinating design handoff between designers and developers

Adora fits well when:

• Your product is live and you need to understand what users actually experience
• You want to know where users deviate from the journeys you designed
• Your team is responsible for improving onboarding, activation, retention, or conversion
• You want friction patterns surfaced automatically without manual session review
• You need a continuously updated visual source of truth for the production product

Both tools fit the full product lifecycle:

Product teams that use both are covering the full cycle. Figma captures intent and enables design work before ship. Adora captures reality and enables improvement work after ship. A team that uses only Figma ships features without understanding if they work. A team that uses only Adora improves the product without a clear record of what was intended.

A user journey documented in Figma is a hypothesis. It shows what you believe users will do. A journey map built from real session data — as Adora's automated journey mapping produces — shows what users actually do. The two are often significantly different.

Adora is not a Figma alternative in the sense of replacing design work. It is a Figma complement in the sense of validating and improving on design intent with real-world evidence after you ship.